The title of Forrest-Thomson's final and posthumously published collection is plurally resonant. The periphery is the liminal area, the crossover point between two sites, states or places. It is both frontier and boundary, depending on how one is positioned. Being on the periphery is perilously near to being close to the edge. Such liminalities, suggestive and rich in potential, are particularly poignant in the light of our retrospective awareness of how close to the end of Forrest-Thomson's life these poems were written. The periphery is a location that can permit the twilight and the transgressive, one which could indeed be called a ‘no-man's-land’, and so we might expect an increasing focus on issues of gender. A periphery is a limit and yet permeable at the same time: a poem, however semantically intransigent, can never make a truly hermetic seal between itself and the reader, and it would be a very odd poem indeed that sought to be utterly impermeable rather than simply to resist recuperation. In this respect the periphery invites comparison with another borderline, that between consciousness and the unconscious, especially when we recall Forrest-Thomson's note in Language-Games that ‘the construction of poems’ – here the syntax permits us to read this doubled, as both ‘the activity of constructing poems’, and ‘the form of poems’ – records ‘thresholds of the experience of being conscious’ (CP 263, my emphasis). We can trace how the process of writing itself becomes increasingly the focus, in a way that will be taken up and developed by the Language writers.

Like Language-Games, On the Periphery had a precursor volume; in the slender Omens Poetry Pamphlet entitled Cordelia or ‘A poem should not mean but be’ (1974) are ten of the poems also published in her last collection. And in the brief untitled preface to Cordelia we find the first clue to the development of Forrest- Thomson's poetic practice, in what appears to be a quotation from the author (who had a fondness for referring to herself in the third person):